Ted Kaczynski - Defining The "unabom"

package bomb injured airlines

On May 25, 1978, Kaczynski delivered a package bomb to a parking lot at the University of Illinois at Chicago. It was addressed to engineering Professor E. J. Smith, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. It appeared to be an undelivered parcel returned to its sender—Professor Buckley Crist of Northwestern University in nearby Evanston, Illinois. Without questioning how it had arrived at a different institution, the finder contacted Professor Crist. Crist claimed to have no knowledge of the parcel but had it sent to him anyway. When he saw the package the following day, he noticed it hadn't been addressed in his own handwriting. This made him suspicious enough to call the campus police to investigate. A security guard was injured when he opened the package and it exploded. A year later, Kaczynski left a second bomb at the institute, which injured a graduate student who opened the package.

Kaczynski was back in Montana by mid-1979 where he worked on his manifesto (a public declaration of principles and aims, especially of a political nature) and improved his bombs. On November 15, 1979, a bomb exploded in the cargo hold of an American Airlines flight, requiring an emergency landing at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.
This ten-by-twelve-foot cabin in Montana was Ted Kaczynski's home for twenty years. When the FBI arrested him there in 1996, they found the material he used to make his bombs as well as other incriminating evidence.(AP/Wide World Photos)
Twelve people suffered from smoke inhalation. So far no one had been killed by Kaczynski's bombs.

The following year, on June 10, the president of United Airlines was injured by a bomb explosion at his home in the Chicago area. By the mid-1980s several more campuses and airlines had been targeted. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was convinced one individual was responsible for all of the bombings. Since serial bombers are mostly male, the authorities assumed it was a male in this case. They formed a task force to determine the bomber's motives in order to identify him.

The codename for the case was UNABOM, an acronym for the bomber's preference of targets, UNiversities and Airlines BOMbings. The media followed the case closely and eventually nicknamed Kaczynski the "Unabomber."

The attacks turned deadly on December 11, 1985, when a computer store owner in Sacramento, California, picked up a package outside his business and it exploded killing him. Then in February 1987 a witness spotted the Unabomber placing a bomb outside a Salt Lake City, Utah, computer store. A police sketch of the man wearing a hooded sweatshirt and dark aviator sunglasses was widely circulated. The bombings stopped for the next six years.

When the attacks began again in June 1993 several bombings left their victims injured but alive. This changed again in December 1994 when an advertising executive in New Jersey opened a package that exploded and killed him. The final murder occurred on April 24, 1995, again in Sacramento, when the president of the California Forestry Association opened a package bomb addressed to the previous president of the association.

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